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In Chicago, a low but persistent rumbling is heard these days, especially on the South Side. It is Frederick Law Olmsted, America’s greatest landscape architect and the planner of what would become the city’s Jackson Park, turning in his grave and muttering Victorian imprecations against Barack Obama and his eponymous foundation.

Why? Before we get to that, let’s see what Olmsted wrote back in 1871 (the year of the Great Chicago Fire), when Hyde Park, Woodlawn, South Shore and other southern lakefront precincts – what would now be classified as inner-city neighborhoods – were still remote, barely settled suburbs of a fast-growing city:

There is but one object of scenery near Chicago of special grandeur or sublimity, and that, the lake, can be made by artificial means no more grand or sublime. By no practical elevation of artificial hills, that is to say, would the impression of the observer in overlooking it be made more profound. The lake may, indeed, be accepted as fully compensating for the absence of sublime or picturesque elevations of land.

There are three elements of scenery however, which must be regarded as indispensable to a fine park to be formed on your site, the first being turf, the second foliage, the third still water. For each of these you are bound, at the outset, to make the best of your opportunities, because if you do not, posterity will be likely to lay waste to what you have done, in order to prepare something better.

Prophetic words. The Obama Foundation, together with city government and the University of Chicago, is now indeed laying waste to one of Olmsted’s major urban landscaping accomplishments, and not in order to replace it with something better.

If Obama, the U. of C. and City Hall have their way, a large chunk – two square blocks, to be exact – of Jackson Park, one of the jewels of Chicago’s 19th century park and boulevard system, will be repurposed, denuded and rendered unrecognizable. If the deal goes through as planned, the private and unaccountable Obama Foundation will be allowed to lease 19.3 acres of prime lakefront land forever for the grand total of one dollar. This stolen public space will house the Obama non-Library, formally dubbed the Obama Presidential Center. (Breaking news: On Wednesday, the Chicago City Council unanimously approved the deal transferring control of the parkland to the Obama Foundation and committing the city to costly “road and pedestrian improvements.” The foundation plans to break ground in 2019, pending federal approval and resolution of lawsuits filed by park protectors, as described below.)

The centerpiece of the OPC, hereafter referred to as the Great Tower of Nothing, is a 235-high foot high structure (that’s 50 feet taller than Rockefeller Chapel, the reigning monument to money and ego in Hyde Park) that is as cold and ugly as avarice itself. Although originally marketed as a presidential archive, the huge and handsomely endowed OPC will house no papers or artifacts of the Obama administration and, for reasons not fully elucidated, will have no connection to the National Archives and Records Administration. The actual presidential papers will be stored, at least temporarily, in an abandoned furniture store in a distant and uninviting suburb of Chicago, which apparently will not be open to the public.

The bunker-like edifice, towering over a newly enlarged golf course, will instead serve the Obama Foundation as “an ongoing project where we will shape, together, what it means to be a good citizen in the 21stcentury.” It is becoming abundantly clear that in the Age of Trump, useful citizenship training will center on theory and practice of civil disobedience and mass resistance. But this is not the sort of “ongoing project” the Obama Foundation seems to have in mind. There is talk about “cultivating the next generation of leaders,” which suggests a long-term goal of using corporate largesse to churn out more triangulating Wall Street Democrats in the Clinton-Obama mold. To skeptics, it is not readily apparent how this content-free non-library, really just a big clubhouse sheltering the vaguely purposed foundation and fundraising apparatus of an ex-president who rarely speaks up on public issues, will secure our rights and liberties in an era of encroaching fascism.

Aware perhaps of the project’s political and historical irrelevance, the Obama Foundation insists that the Great Tower of Nothing will bring new life and energy to a comatose neighborhood. The OPC be a “new landmark for the Southside and an economic engine for the city of Chicago, drawing hundreds of thousands of visitors every year, creating thousands of jobs – and will help to continue the revitalization of historic Jackson Park.”

These claims are typical pie-in-the-sky developer talk. Yes, the Obama un-library may well turn out to be an engine of development, but not in a way that will benefit the 99 percent. Quite the contrary, as we will see. And as for redeveloping Jackson Park: “No matter how they describe it, they’re taking away parkland,” says the redoubtable Herb Caplan, whose tiny Protect Our Parks group is suing to stop construction of the project, charging that it’s an “institutional bait-and-switch” designed to privatize the commons. This sets a terrible precedent for Chicago’s public lakefront, which by a city mandate going way back to 1836 is pledged “to remain forever open, clear and free of any buildings, or other obstruction whatever.”

So what is the underlying purpose of this over-scaled, oddly empty complex, which may end up costing as much as $1.5 billion to build and endow, all to convert a rare spot of green in an under-parked city into yet another heavily trafficked, highly paved, tightly controlled space? I think it’s pretty clear, if you look at the players, history and trends. It’s all about gentrification, i.e., ethnic cleansing, which is already taking place in Chicago at a pace never before seen.

I contend that the plutocrat-funded Obama Foundation and Presidential Center play the same role in the long-term transformation of the city’s southern lakefront that the Obama presidency did in American politics: that of putting a faux-progressive smiley face on the ugly underlying realities of institutionalized inequality, capitalist skullduggery and white privilege. As others have noted, this white elephant on the lake is actually a Trojan horse, using understandable but misplaced racial pride and identity politics and a fuzzy do-gooder mission statement to mask a real estate scheme that is all about neighborhood flipping and displacement of the poor.

A little historical context will help clarify things. In 1980 – about when Harold Washington was contemplating his historic mayoral run – Chicago’s black population peaked at nearly 1.2 million. The Urban Institute estimates that by 2030, that number will drop to 665,000 – an astonishing 45 percent decline over 50 years. According to journalist and researcher Alden Loury, “The restrictive covenants, red lining and white flight of yesterday have been replaced by stiff resistance to affordable housing, high-cost housing that effectively prices out some people of color, and disinvestment in communities of color regardless of their economic heft.” The result is that the 20thcentury’s Great Migration of African-Americans from the South has become the 21stcentury’s Great Exodus from Chicago, a shift in direction driven by the same virulent, undying racism.

The University of Chicago, which engineered the Jackson Park non-library bid, is the institutional driving force of the Great Tower of Nothing. The University, which used federal urban renewal (or as James Baldwin liked to say, “Negro removal”) funds to boot thousands of mostly minority families out of Hyde Park and nearby Kenwood during the 1960s, no doubt sees the Jackson Park complex as an outpost of its own campus, projecting its identity southward and creating a larger buffer zone for its intensively policed, bubble-like neighborhood. It also serves to reinforce the university’s deep and marketable connection to the Obamas (Barack taught at the law school; Michelle had an executive position at the medical school) and to the neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party they personify. But there is more at stake here: Since the OPC project was launched, the U. of C. has announced its intentions of building a 1,200-bed student housing complex nearby, as well as a “boutique hotel.” These ventures would be an unthinkable risk for the cautious institution were it not for the billionaire-funded and city-subsidized boondoggle anchoring the site.

It’s all about property values, tax revenues and “desirable” demographics. Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama’s one-time chief of staff and currently Chicago’s notorious Mayor One Percent, speaks no other language. But what does Obama, Rahm’s old boss and staunch friend, say about all this?

At a community meeting this past winter, Obama commented: “We’ve got such a long way to go in terms of economic development before you’re even going to start seeing the prospect of significant gentrification. Malia’s kids might have to worry about that.”

If you can get past the dripping condescension of that remark, you encounter its Trump-like disingenuousness. Gentrification has long since begun oozing south of the Midway, the wide boulevard that once formed the university’s southern border. Woodlawn, south of Hyde Park, was declared the third hottest neighborhood in the nation for the first half of 2017, with median housing values rising 18% in that time, according to the City Lab website.

If it wished to, the Obama Foundation could make a strong statement regarding the evils of gentrification and displacement. But that’s not what the Foundation is about.

What it is about is raising money, great gobs of cash, principally by tapping the obscenely rich. In 2017, the Obama Foundation solicited no less than $232.6 million. Million-dollar donations have come from such checkered sources as financier Ken Griffin (Illinois’ richest man, who also gave $20 million to the campaign of Bruce Rauner, the state’s reactionary Republican governor), Goldman Sachs, Bill Gates and George Lucas – whose own attempt to blot the lakefront with a monument to self only recently went down to defeat, as I hope this one does too.

Why the super-wealthy are so eager to contribute to a paper-free “library” and artifact-free “museum” in a part of Chicago they are unlikely to visit is a question that invites speculation. One possible answer is that Obama is redeeming his chits from eight years of meritorious service to the ruling class, including his unstinting if unsuccessful devotion to the Trans-Pacific Partnership, an arrangement that would have transferred huge amounts of what was once quaintly known as national sovereignty to our transnational corporate overlords. It was just about the only piece of legislation that Obama was willing to get on the mat and fight for. No wonder he’s expecting and receiving concrete manifestations of gratitude, especially from the tycoons who went unindicted and fully bonused-up after the 2008 meltdown, winding up bigger and stronger and more arrogant than ever.

What we do know is what the oligarchs paying the bills don’t want or like. This includes attacks on the economic and political forces of gentrification, which they view as progress, or advocacy for affordable housing, or acknowledgment of systemic inequality and injustice, or demands for radical change on behalf of – among others – the many poor and disenfranchised people on the South Side. This fundamental class bias – this need to be, as the professional fundraisers say, “donor-friendly” – explains the most puzzling gaffe so far by the Obama Foundation: its failure to negotiate a community benefits agreement with local organizations, which would increase consultation with neighbors and ensure that at least some needs are met and some fears allayed. This is one of the project’s multiple ironies: that Barack Obama, the one-time South Side community organizer, is now thwarting a South Side community from empowering itself and taking part in decisions that will affect it for generations. No longer needing the community’s votes, Obama plays the paternalistic benefactor, giving the neighborhood what he and his rich friends and expert staff know it really needs, and who cares what the non-degreed riff-raff think.

If billionaires want to throw their money away on a gold-plated cultural non-asset like the Obama Presidential Center, who am I to say nay? It is, after all, a free country, especially for those who own it. But let the fat cats put the non-library where, if it can’t do actual good, it will at least do less harm. There are hundreds and thousands of empty lots on the South and West Sides of Chicago, places where construction of any kind would be a plus, bringing some measure of hope and attention to depleted and forgotten neighborhoods. Jackson Park is literally the worst possible location for job creation, despite the Foundation’s claims. There can be no spin-off construction on what technically remains public parkland, no next-door retail or restaurants or residences. Yes, there will be some jobs attached, but they will be classic examples of what author David Graeber terms “bullshit jobs,” PR and legal and security and administrative sinecures that are at best unnecessary and at worst pernicious and/or absurd: e.g., well-paid fundraisers raising funds to hire more fundraisers to raise more funds, ad infinitum. The Obama Foundation and other Establishment-blessed philanthropies of its type are expressly designed to manufacture a certain kind of liberal bullshit. By turning stark social and economic conflicts into fundable, non-threatening “programming,” they lubricate the squeaky gears of the social order rather than confronting its stubborn contradictions. The astronomical salaries paid to Obama Foundation leadership – in 2017, the executive director and CEO earned a combined $1.48 million – suggest that the organization is unlikely to pit itself against the capitalist inequities that shred the social fabric and are the bottom line in the South Side’s racialized poverty equation.

I earlier described the Obama Foundation’s Jackson Park follies as a Trojan horse, but perhaps Potemkin village is the better metaphor. The proposed complex is a spectacle that symbolizes community life and culture and memory and scholarship and public purpose without actually containing anything of historical value – just as the Obama administration symbolized progressive politics and racial advancement, concealing its chronic and self-neutering passivity, dead-centrist philosophy and unquestioned allegiance to the powers that be behind a façade of faux-populist rhetoric and wispy good intentions.

Chicago doesn’t need this hollow monument to gentrification, elitism and privatization on its lakefront. We as a nation don’t need more crumbs from the tables of the billionaires who choke and starve us, or more tainted foundation dollars turning angry activists into tame “social entrepreneurs.”

What we do need is tough, radical, grassroots democracy – which is to say, the community itself, and not self-appointed champions with their own agenda, taking on the strategic neglect and cancerous disinvestment that constitute slow-motion ethnic cleansing. In the unlikely event that Barack Obama really wants to make life better for all on the South Side of Chicago, he will need to come down from his sky-scraping glass and concrete fortress and join those on the ground, listening to what they say. If Obama could do that, which at this point he cannot, he might come to the sobering conclusion that his world is not their world, his friends are not their friends, and his hopes and dreams, as embodied in his fraudulent and destructive non-library, are built on their despair.

Hugh Iglarsh is a Chicago-based writer and editor who loves libraries and museums, but not fake ones. This essay began as a soapbox rant he gave at the annual Bughouse Square Debates, sponsored by the Newberry Library. He can be reached at hiiglarsh@hotmail.com.

“Unfortunately today, these neoconservatives whose philosophy is that intellectuals should be in the service of tyrants who rule using big lies and mass murder, have taken over the academy and they don’t belong in the academy,” said Kevin Barrett, who has a Ph.D in Arab and Islamic studies and is one of America’s best-known critics of the so-called war on terror.

“Transparency and freedom are the ideals of the academy; because the neoconservatives reject these ideals, they have no business in the academy” Barrett told Press TV on Monday.

On Saturday, an American female professor at a Christian university who got in trouble after wearing the hijab and saying Muslims and Christians worship the same God has agreed to leave the school.

Wheaton College, located near Chicago, Illinois, and political science professor Larycia Hawkins have reached a confidential agreement in which they will “part ways,” the college said in a statement.

“This seems to be a very strange kind of phenomenon that a professor should not be allowed to teach at a university,” said Barret, who himself was fired from the University of Wisconsin for accusing the US government of being involved in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

“The whole idea is ludicrous but apparently not in Wheaton College, where Islamophobia appears to be mandatory,” he added. “Anyone who doesn’t hate Muslims with all their heart and soul apparently is not welcome to teach at Wheaton College.”

“It’s a disgrace and an outrage and travesty and anybody who cares about freedom in America should head straight to Chicago to protest, to go and occupy the offices of the administration [of Wheaton College] there.”

A New Year’s Eve release of hundreds of internal emails by the City of Chicago reveals the Independent Police Review Authority not living up to its name as “independent.” In one email, the mayor’s office said the IPRA was giving a “statement we approved.”

After weeks of requests from multiple media outlets, thousands of pages of emails pertaining to the Laquan McDonald case have been released. The records dump took place on Thursday – New Year’s Eve – the start of a long holiday weekend when most people are more focused on celebrating. On October 20, 2014, 17-year-old McDonald was walking away from police while carrying a small knife when he was shot 16 times by Officer Jason Van Dyke, who this week pled not guilty to murder charges following the release of a dashcam video last month.

The IPRA is billed as a civilian agency within the city government. It is responsible for assessing police shootings, but many emails reveal that the agency coordinated its handling of the case with Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s staff.

On December 5, 2014, former IPRA chief Scott Ando emailed Janey Rountree, Deputy Chief of Staff for Public Safety, to provide a “list of cases pending review by either the [State Attorney’s Office] or the [US Attorney’s Office]” involving Chicago police misconduct. Ando also indicated which officers were being charged at the time.

“In this case it was a status update on cases that were being reviewed by prosecutors for possible criminal investigation. The mayor’s office obviously does not direct investigations, nor are any employees involved in those investigations,” Adam Collins, a spokesman for the mayor, told the Chicago Sun-Times.

In another email to Rountree, Collins expressed frustration with the IPRA for not taking his advice when responding to a question from the media regarding McDonald.

That May 26 email reads in part, “Against my recommendation, IPRA has already provided this response that was a little antagonistic. I’ve asked that they follow up with this as well to soften and reinforce their message,” while going on to provide a paragraph that played up IPRA’s investigatory powers and its independence.

In an earlier email dated April 10 to Stephen Patton Collins, a top legal adviser to Mayor Emanuel, Collins had expressed more satisfaction with the IPRA. In that one he reported that Jeremy Gorner of the Chicago Tribune had “just asked IPRA about the McDonald settlement,” alluding to the $5 million civil payout to the McDonald family.

“IPRA is giving him the statement we approved,” Collins wrote, going on to paste the two sentence statement.

On November 18, a week before the release of the dashcam footage showing McDonald’s killing, Collins emailed several representatives of police and law departments telling them, “we need one voice on this topic,” and then provided a “city statement” to provide talking points.

“Here’s a first crack. I don’t think we should stray far from where we have been all along on this,” the email reads, before providing a draft of an official explanation as to why the video has yet to be released.

The dump of internal emails has only fueled more criticism of Chicago’s government on social media and in the streets of Chicago, where protests calling for Emanuel’s resignation have not let up.

Dozens of protesters gathered at Emanuel’s home for the third evening in a row on Thursday, promising to show up for at least another 13 days to symbolize the 16 gunshots McDonald took from police.

Elsewhere on New Year’s Eve, protesters temporarily took over parts of City Hall and a Hyatt hotel lobby.

These demonstrations were anticipated in some of the released emails. In one dated November 20, a campaign donor of Emanuel, Graham Grady, writes to Stephen Patton, one of Emanuel’s top advisers, offering to finance what could be described as controlled opposition.

“Steve, I love Chicago and I’m concerned that the city may erupt when and if the video gets out,” Grady writes. “What if the Mayor and some community leaders such as Fr. Pfleger lead a peaceful demonstration with 100+ African-American youth wearing red mortar boards to symbolize education as the solution while also invoking the image of Laquan McDonald in a positive manner?”

“You can get red mortar board caps for $10 bucks a piece. I’ll pay for 100 of them. Please let me know if I may be of assistance in helping in any way,” the email ends.

Bettie Jones, left, and Quintonio LeGrier

Responding to a domestic violence call about about a teenage man threatening to hurt his father with a baseball bat, Chicago police arrived and shot a middle-aged woman dead after she opened the door to let them inside.

Then they shot the teenager dead.

Neither one of them was armed with a gun.

Chicago police offered scarce details other than telling the media they arrived at the building and “were confronted by a combative individual, resulting in an officer firing shots, fatally wounding two individuals.”

But dispatchers clearly told officers the situation involved a 19-year-old male with a bat, not a middle-aged woman who apparently was only trying to let them inside the building.

The woman’s name was Bettie Jones, a mother of five, who was either 55 or 57. She lived in the downstairs flat of the two-story building owned by the teen’s father, who lived in the upstairs flat with his wife and son.

Her daughter, Latesha Jones said police shot her from outside the door while her mother remained inside the door.

The teen’s father had told her to be on the lookout for police and to stay away from his son, who was having a mental episode.

The teen’s name was Quintonio Legrier, 19, a Northern Illinois University student studying engineering, who also suffered from mental illness and was prone to outbursts, but was not known to be violent.

“He was having a mental situation. Sometimes he will get loud, but not violent,” the teen’s mother, Janet Cookery, told ABC 7.

Early this morning, the teen began banging on their bedroom door with a bat, which is when the father called police.

Despite his mental illness, Legrier appeared to be studious and benevolent, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

Legrier was admitted in 2014 to Northern Illinois University, where he majored in electrical engineering technology, according to the university’s website.

He had graduated last year from Gwendolyn Brooks College Preparatory Academy with honors, for having a grade-point average of 3.0 or higher, according to the school’s website.

Legrier, who weighed 150 pounds, was shot seven times. The name of the officer has not been released.

“You call the police, you try to get help and you lose a loved one,” she told the Chicago Tribune. “What are they trained for? Just to kill? I thought that we were supposed to get service and protection. I mean, my son was an honors student. He’s here for Christmas break, and now I’ve lost him.”

With protesters thronging the streets of Chicago demanding police accountability and clamoring for the resignation of Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the city’s police union is frantically trying to destroy decades of records documenting police misconduct. As is always the case, the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) sees “officer safety” as the highest priority – including protection from legal accountability.

“I protect all my members, and I will continue to do that,” Dean Angelo, president of the Chicago FOP, explained to CNN.
An injunction filed by the FOP insists that preserving those records violates Section 8.4 of its bargaining agreement with the City of Chicago. That provision specifies that all files of misconduct investigations and officer disciplinary histories “will be destroyed five (5) years after the date of the incident or the date upon which the violation is discovered, whichever is longer, except that not sustained files alleging criminal conduct or excessive force shall be retained for a period of seven (7) years after the date of the incident or the date upon which the violation is discovered, whichever is longer….”

Once that deadline passes, the episode of excessive force or other misconduct “cannot be used against the Officer in any future proceedings in any other forum” unless it deals with a matter subject to litigation during the five year period or “unless a pattern of sustained infractions exists.” This element of the bargaining agreement creates an incentive for the police department to delay, obstruct, and obfuscate investigations of misconduct and abuse complaints until the deadline expires – and to keep the process opaque to the public.

“Basically, they bargained away transparency and accountability,” points out Chicago University Law Professor Craig Futterman, who is fighting in court to prevent the destruction of the officer misconduct records. “In a world where an incident like [the fatal police shooting of Laquan McDonald] happens and the public statements are `Deny, deny, deny,’ and then close off and circle the wagons, and then a code of silence and an exoneration at the end of the day – in that system, you cannot create public trust,” Futterman explained to theChicago Daily Law Bulletin.

Working with independent journalist Jamie Kalven, Futterman was able to exhume the video of the McDonald shooting and the autopsy report showing that he had been shot sixteen times – evidence that completely contradicted the official account that described the shooting as “self-defense.” Jason Van Dyke, the officer who shot McDonald, has been charged with first-degree murder, an all but unprecedented development involving an on-duty police shooting in Chicago.

Through freedom of information requests, Futterman has also pried loose a small portion of the disciplinary files, which are available in an online database. The records Futterman seeks to preserve date back to 1967, and cover decades of corruption and abuse, including the now-notorious Jon Burge torture scandal and the unlawful detentions, interrogations, and abuse of citizens at the Homan Square “black site.” The FOP-negotiated contract requiring the destruction of records after five years went into effect on July 1, 2012 – and it is by no means clear that it applies retroactively to misconduct cases that occurred prior to that agreement. The FOP is essentially seeking to re-litigate the agreement for the purpose of obstructing an ongoing Justice Department investigation into the Chicago PD.

Although FOP President Angelo pouts that “I don’t understand why a 77-year-old retirees’ complaint in 1967 needs to be on a database,” the records his union seeks to destroy include disciplinary histories directly relevant to very recent incidents of excessive force.

According to CNN, “a search for Jason Van Dyke, the officer charged with the first-degree murder in the killing of Laquan McDonald, shows that he had 19 complaints before he fatally shot the teen, including 10 for use of force. The officer who shot and killed Cedrick Chatman has 30 complaints in the system, including 10 for use of force. None of the complaints, for either officer, resulted in disciplinary action. Van Dyke’s attorney says his client feared for his life in his encounter with McDonald. The Chatman shooting was ruled justified.”

Preserving the records, and making them publicly accessible, could help identify officers who pose potential threats to the public they supposedly serve. The FOP, in keeping with its long-established priorities, is more concerned about preserving blue privilege.

Some of Burge’s erstwhile comrades in torture are still under investigation – and the documents necessary to continue that probe would be fed into a shredder if the FOP prevails in court. Those records most likely would also contain information about the Chicago PD’s off-the-records interrogation facility at Homan Square, a CIA-style “black site” where thousands of people were detained without cause and interrogated without constitutionally mandated access to an attorney, reports the Guardian of London.

An estimated 82 percent of the 7,000 people who were arrested and illegally held at Homan Square are black. Angel Perez, who was chained to a metal bar in a second-floor interrogation room at the facility in October 2012, alleges that he was sodomized with a metallic object by officers who taunted him with threats of prison rape if he didn’t cooperate. During a December 15 hearing before the Cook County Commission, several other detainees described being denied access to lawyers and being pressured to become police informants.

“There they interrogated me, asking me things that I had no idea about, for murder and things of that nature,” testified Kory Wright. “And I sat in that room, and they turned the temperature up and I was zip-tied to a bench.”

This Gitmo-style “rendition” site operated under Rahm Emanuel’s tenure, and it features very prominently in the accumulating demands for his resignation. With protests growing in intensity, the Mayor under political siege, and the police department desperately seeking to destroy evidence of long-festering corruption and misconduct, Chicago’s municipal government is beginning to look like an authoritarian dictatorship in the throes of a terminal crisis – Tehran circa 1978, perhaps, or Romania in December 1989.

Career Democrat party member, former congressman, Obama White House chief of staff, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel took office in May 2011 – reelected last April for another four-year term.

He’s notoriously hard-line, neoliberal and pro-Israeli to a fault. The late Chicago-based Citizens Committee to Clean up the Courts chairman Sherman Skolnick called him the “acting deputy chief for North America of Mossad.”

His father, Benjamin, was involved in smuggling weapons to the Jewish Irgun underground terrorist group (co-led by future Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin) in Palestine pre-1948.

Their elements were notoriously involved in bombing Jerusalem’s King David Hotel (July 1946 – slaughtering 92 Brits, Arabs and Jews, along with wounding 58 others), as well as the horrific Deir Yassin massacre (April 1948), randomly killing up to 120 defenseless Palestinians mercilessly, including women and children, dozens more in continued fighting – part of the future state of Israel’s genocidal ethnic cleansing master plan.

Emmanuel is a former civilian IDF volunteer during the 1991 Gulf War. It’s believed he holds dual citizenships – a dubious status for any US politician.

Throughout his political career, he’s been unabashedly pro-war, neoliberal and anti-populist. His abrasive style alienates him from anyone opposing his hard-line views.

Chicago notoriously earned a reputation as the police repression capital of America. A Gitmo type operation on the city’s west side is Exhibit A – operating off-the-books in a nondescript Homan Square warehouse, the domestic equivalent of a CIA or Pentagon black site.

Mostly Blacks are lawlessly arrested, detained, painfully shackled, interrogated, terrorized and beaten without access to counsel for a day or longer – to coerce confessions to offenses never committed or ones too minor to matter.

City police have virtual carte blanche authority to operate with impunity. Responsibility goes right to the top – Emanuel complicit with what goes on, likely much more illegally than now known, including cops killing Chicagoans unaccountably.

They lay supine, at least one holding a sign saying: “DO NO HARM.” A much larger “die-in” protest occurred Thursday evening.

Some critics called for abolishing the so-called Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA) – notorious for covering up cop killings. A criminal code of silence prevails.

Almost never are officers responsible for killing civilians held accountable. Even the right-wing Chicago Tribune said “it’s common knowledge that Chicago’s system of investigating shootings by officers is flawed…at so many levels…by design…”

Critics want a new independent, citizen-controlled police audit authority established, empowered to sue the city administration and police so killer cops and their superiors up the chain of command to the top can be held accountable for crimes too serious to ignore.

An Illinois Better Government Association study, covering the period 2010 – 2014, called Chicago tops among America’s largest cities in fatal shootings by police, most often targeting defenseless Black males.

Almost never are cops prosecuted imprisoned, especially in cases involving extrajudicial assassinations. Emanuel’s hollow apology for McDonald’s murder and duplicitous promised “complete and total reform of the system” fooled no one.

Protesters outside City Hall chanted “no more killer cops” and “Rahm must go.” Chance for real reform by his or any other city administration is virtually zero.

Last of Chicago’s saloon keeper aldermen, Paddy Bowler, was right, saying: “Chicago ain’t ready for reform” – for sure not with Emanuel as mayor.

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Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net.

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: How the US Drive for Hegemony Risks World War III”.

Although President Barack Obama has pledged $263 million in federal grants to fund body cameras for police departments throughout the country, some still feel the effort will do little to hold officers accountable if they engage in suspicious or unlawful activity.

Lisa Schreibersdorf, executive director of Brooklyn Defender Services, points to the recent case of Laquan McDonald, a 17-year-old who was fatally shot last year by a police officer after he responded to a call about a man with a knife.

An officer’s dashboard camera captured footage of that incident. However, Chicago’s mayor and police commissioner struggled to keep those recordings away from the eyes of the public arguing the footage could interfere with the court case.

Following the efforts of journalists and lawyers, however, a judge finally forced city officials to release the video in November leading to the prosecution of Officer Jason Van Dyke for murder more than a year after the shooting.

“Many have suggested that the prosecution would never have come if the City had succeeded in keeping the video under wraps — an allegation that Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alverez denies, but nevertheless casts doubt on the ability or willingness of the police, prosecutors or even the City administration to hold individual officers accountable unless forced to do so,” Schreibersdorf explained to the Huffington Post.

In many instances, city officials can fight to keep police body-camera footage from being seen by the public and defense attorneys.

In New York City, for example, body-camera recordings legally are categorized as an officer’s file making it difficult for defense attorneys to access it. Police Commissioner Bill Bratton has said that body camera footage would not be released to the public under any circumstances.

“That leaves us in the potential situation of receiving body camera footage only when it serves the NYPD and the prosecution, not when it exonerates our clients or incriminates an officer,” said Schreibersdorf. “Such a scheme favors neither justice nor accountability and is one that we, as public defenders, often the last line of defense against executive power, could never support.”

After more than a year of stonewalling and what some might call obstructing justice, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel issued an apology for the horrific execution of Laquan McDonald by Chicago police officer Jason van Dyke. Laquan McDonald was the black 17-year-old who was shot 16 times by the police officer on Oct. 20, 2014. The video showing the shooting was only released by Chicago officials when they were ordered to do so by a judge in late November 2015.

But apology or not, the underlying substantive issue is that the summary execution of McDonald was the sort of atrocity that one would expect to see in what the U.S. once called “police states.” In fact, one can imagine a death squad execution in El Salvador in the 1980s looking very similar on video to McDonald’s slaying.

“Police state” is a term which has fallen into disuse since 9/11 with the adoption of so many similar practices by the so-called “democracies” in their domestic policies. The term generally was applied to Fascist or Communist governments and described a country where the police and the military exercised martial law over citizens or military occupation powers that uses military force to control a civilian population.

Sometimes these arbitrary powers were enforced by summary executions, depending on how much the authorities could get away with in their “extreme measures.” This was the practice in countries such as Nazi Germany; Pinochet’s Chile; El Salvador and Guatemala during the Cold War; to a lesser degree, apartheid South Africa; and military occupied territories such as Tibet, Israeli-occupied Palestine, and Eastern Europe under the Soviet Union.

But Chicago isn’t under martial law or military occupation, is it? Nor is it an apartheid state, with apartheid enforced by domestic martial law and military force, is it? To a normal civilian-oriented mind, one would think it is not under military occupation or martial law.

Seeking Israeli Training

Yet, under Mayor Emanuel, a former Israeli Defense Force (IDF) volunteer, and Garry McCarthy, the now former Chicago Police Superintendent (Emanuel fired him Dec. 1), it seems that parts of Chicago were treated as if they were occupied territory under police or paramilitary rule.

That is, under arbitrary martial law, just like the repressive martial law regime of the IDF in the occupied territory of Palestine. Martial law or occupation law is arbitrary as it is not law, but is the manifestation of the occupying military commander’s “will.”

How could this be in the civilian government of Chicago? In part, because Police Superintendent McCarthy and the City of Chicago sought out and received training by Israeli occupation forces in “counter-terrorism” policing, that is, “pacifying” a population through aggressive intelligence gathering and the application of military force. Counter-insurgency is the term used for when this doctrine is applied by military forces.

This collaboration between Israel and U.S. police agencies, including Chicago, emerged after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. Since then, by one count, at least 300 high-ranking sheriffs and police from cities both large and small have received counter-terrorism training in Israel. For instance, in January 2003, 33 senior U.S. law enforcement officials from Chicago and other major American cities flew to Israel for sessions on “Law Enforcement in the Era of Global Terror.”

In 2009, Israel’s Midwest Consulate General co-sponsored “an intensive seminar” in Israel for senior Chicago police officials “on intelligence-led policing techniques.” Chicago Police Superintendent McCarthy was a key participant in this Israeli seminar. The Israel Trade & Economic Office of the U.S. Midwest Region invited police officials to “Join Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy & the Midwest Delegation to the Israel Homeland Security International Conference 2012, and be a part of an international gathering of public security officials and private technology companies.”

In 2012, these “security officials” got to “experience demonstrations of breakthrough technologies from Israel” and “tour security infrastructure at the Old City of Jerusalem,” a city under Israeli military occupation. It wasn’t made clear if the “demonstrations of breakthrough technologies from Israel” would extend to live subjects in occupied Jerusalem.

In November 2014, Chicago’s McCarthy “led a delegation of senior law enforcement officials to Israel” as part of a training mission “to engage directly with their Israeli counterparts to discuss best practices, unique strategies, and new technologies in a range of law enforcement areas,” according to the same Israeli trade office.

“The visit also aimed to build a foundation for enhanced collaboration between the Chicago Police Department and the State of Israel.” Included in the delegation was the Executive Director of Cook County’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Office, the Chief of Staff of the Chicago Police Department, as well as police officials from other large American cities. [The itinerary of the delegation is explained more here.]

In other words, over more than a decade, senior Chicago police officials have been studying Israel’s militarized police practices for how best to maintain a repressive military control over an occupied population living under permanent, strict martial, or occupation, law.

An Occupation Mentality

Why this matters is that Israel doesn’t have a domestic civilian policing model but instead applies a counter-insurgency policing model intended for a population under military occupation, or otherwise considered as hostile under martial law.

This policing model is being sold by Israel’s government to gullible or authoritarian-leaning U.S. police officials as a legitimate domestic policing model when, in fact, it is a military model of the sort used by militaristic, authoritarian regimes, customarily referred to as “fascist.”

What many people fail to understand about Israel and the IDF is that since 1967, now going on half a century, the Palestinian civilians who “fell into [Israeli] hands” when the IDF conquered Palestinian territory have been kept in strict and harsh military captivity of the sort the U.S. condemned when the former Soviet Union did the same to its captive peoples.

This pattern continues even though the Israeli occupation has been repeatedly declared illegal under international law. Chicago police being trained by Israeli security police and occupation forces is analogous to, and merits the same condemnation as, a U.S. city sending its officials to receive “police” training from Soviet security police who maintained military occupation of Eastern Europe in the 1950s-1960s. Or to North Korea today.

But in this case, there is also the issue of colluding with Israeli occupation authorities in an illegal occupation. These U.S. police officials are put in what should be the awkward position of aiding and abetting illegality.

Of course, one killing by a Chicago police officer, though similar to some of the killings by the IDF of civilians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, and far below the scale of killing of the periodic “mowing the grass” that Israel undertakes in Gaza every couple of years, does not mean that illegal military occupation tactics are being practiced in Chicago. Or does it?

Secret Interrogations

In isolation, no. But while Chicago police have always had the reputation of being simply a rival gang to the many other gangs in Chicago’s history, under Rahm Emanuel’s regime, it has come to resemble an occupying military force down to a “secret interrogation facility,” as reported by Britain’s Guardian newspaper in August 2015: “At least 3,500 Americans have been detained inside a Chicago police warehouse described by some of its arrestees as a secretive interrogation facility, newly uncovered records reveal.”

The Chicago Police Department maintained that the warehouse was not a secret facility “so much as an undercover police base operating in plain sight.” But, as the Guardian reported, people were shackled and held for hours or even days without access to attorneys in violation of the U.S. Constitution, but the sort of detention permitted of Palestinians under IDF occupation.

A Chicago civil rights activist said he was abducted by masked officers, shackled and held on false charges, “with no food, no water, no access to the outside world” at the behest of “covert operations.” In other words, he simply disappeared.

Another former “detainee,” Charles Jones, was told in the interrogation room that he would be allowed a phone call once booked and processed. But he said his requests for legal counsel were repeatedly denied during the six-to-eight hours he was held at Homan Square.

“The only reason you’re brought to Homan and Fillmore is to extract information,” Jones said, referring to the cross streets of the facility.

“The police probably feel they need those covert operations because that’s the only way to get the intel they need instead of doing the good work – the hard work. . . . It’s easy to just go grab someone, throw ’em somewhere – no food, no water, no access to the outside world, intimidating and threatening ’em,” he said.

That is similar to intelligence-driven techniques used in counter-insurgency warfare. Several ex-Homan Square detainees told the Guardian that their detentions “were out of proportion to their alleged crimes, if any – but calibrated to pressure them into becoming informants.” This, in fact, is just like what U.S. forces did in occupied Iraq and Israeli forces do in Occupied Palestine. Indeed, that is what occupying armies do.

According to the Guardian, while the police data is incomplete, the disclosures “suggest an intensification of Homan Square usage under Emanuel. Approximately 70% of the Homan Square detentions the Chicago police acknowledge thus far have occurred under the current mayor.”

At the time of the Guardian article, then-Police Superintendent McCarthy was attending a meeting on violence and policing in Washington and was unavailable for comment.

After the Guardian’s initial Homan Square exposé in February 2015, protests were held and local politicians called for investigations. But Rahm Emanuel was not among the concerned officials even though he was running for re-election in part on a platform of police reform. Instead, Emanuel took ownership of the unorthodox operation and “defended his police,” claiming, “we follow all the rules” at Homan Square and called the reporting “not true.”

Israeli Comparisons

To Mayor Emanuel and former Superintendent McCarthy, it seemed, affluent sections of Chicago’s North Side are to Chicago’s South and West sides what Tel Aviv is to Occupied Palestine’s Jerusalem and Ramallah.

Emanuel and McCarthy seemed to have imported the Israeli military occupation ideology that just as Palestine must be kept “under the heavy heel of Israeli military occupation,” so must Chicago’s poorer areas be kept under the heavy heel of the Chicago police, acting as a paramilitary occupation force.

That Emanuel bears responsibility for all that has taken place in regard to the McDonald execution is shown in his role in making the Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA), the civilian agency that investigates allegations of excessive force by police, irrelevant.

The Chicago Tribune published an examination that found that of the 409 police shootings since IPRA was created in September 2007, only two allegations against police officers were deemed credible. (Emanuel has been mayor since May 16, 2011.)

This week, in announcing that former federal prosecutor Sharon Fairley would take charge of the IPRA after the resignation of her predecessor, neither Emanuel nor Fairley addressed how IPRA would improve “its woeful track record in investigating shootings,” as the Chicago Tribune described it.

Instead, Fairley stated: “the mission of IPRA will remain the same: thorough, fair and timely investigation of police officer misconduct.” Absurdly, that seems to be a statement asserting that nothing would change, allowing the police to continue operating with a sense of entitlement as they run roughshod over a population they are supposed to protect.

According to the Chicago Tribune, Chicago police officials under Emanuel stopped participating in meetings with the IPRA to discuss officer shootings, “a change that came with the knowledge of the mayor’s office.” Will that remain the same?

U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch was asked whether the federal investigation would extend to the mayor’s and state’s attorney’s offices. Notwithstanding Emanuel’s alleged role in shutting down police participation with the IPRA, Lynch said the investigation would focus on the Police Department’s practices.

That’s not all that remarkable when one considers that the U.S. Justice Department and President Barack Obama declared they would take no action on the issue of “war on terror” torture by U.S. government officials involving the CIA and the military. As President Obama’s former Chief of Staff, Emanuel seems to fall under a similar protective shield of impunity.

What is remarkable is that the Illinois Legislative Black Caucus “called for Lynch to expand her probe to include IPRA and the state’s attorney’s office, but it left out the mayor’s office.” That is remarkable because Mayor Emanuel appears to be the person who gave impunity for civil rights violations to Chicago police officers to the degree that they felt legally immune in summarily executing Laquan McDonald.

A Family History

If Mayor Rahm Emanuel seems to have brought a Fascist sensibility to Chicago and the police force, it can be said it’s part of a family tradition. According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Emanuel “is the son of a Jerusalem-born pediatrician who was a member of the Irgun (Etzel or IZL), a militant Zionist group that operated in Palestine between 1931 and 1948.”

In addition, according to Emanuel’s father, Benjamin, his son “is the namesake of Rahamim, a Lehi combatant who was killed” and was obviously a close friend or seen as a martyr. Both Lehi and the Irgun were terrorist organizations, not only in the eyes of the British and the Arabs in pre-Israel Palestine, but in the eyes of their fellow Jews, whom they also attacked.

Furthermore, the clandestine terror squads considered themselves Fascist organizations, not only in their tactics but in their ideology which had aligned them with Mussolini’s Italy and other inter-war European Fascist parties.

In The Road to Power: Herut Party in Israel, author Yonathan Shapiro describes Irgun as the military wing of the Betar Movement. The two groups jointly published a paper, Die Tat. Shapiro writes: “Betar activists were swept up by the radical-right nationalism then at its height in Europe.”

This was shown in the Betar press in Poland, where the Yiddish-language Betar-Irgun paper Die Tat was sympathetic to radical-right parties. The paper ran a series of articles in late 1938 and early 1939 entitled “The Third Europe,” which Shapiro says “was the overall name given to radical-right movements such as the Nazis in Germany, the Fascists in Italy, the Iron Guard in Romania, and the Franco camp in Spain, and so forth.”

One article in the series explained that Hitler’s attempted putsch in 1923 derailed “the German leadership from its track of havlagah – the same term that Zionist leaders used for their policy of moderation in their dealings with the Arab nationalist movement in Palestine.” The implication was that the Jewish radical right had to do something similar to break the Jewish leaders from moderation in Palestine.

Another Die Tat writer who was based in Tel Aviv argued that anti-Semitism wasn’t “an integral part of Naziism, which in the final analysis was a version of Fascism,” of which he approved. In an editorial entitled, “Hitler and Judaism,” a few weeks later, “the paper wrote that it did not reject Hitler’s views, not even on the race issue. It only objected to the campaign that ‘in practice’ he was waging against the Jewish people, and its desire to establish an independent state.”

Lessons of Terror

In 1942, Menachem Begin arrived in “Eretz-Israel,” as Irgun members referred to Palestine. He was “offered command of the Irgun and leadership of Betar.” Begin refused leadership of Betar on the grounds that Ze’ev Jabotinsky, though dead, remained head of Betar, and Jabotinsky as the irreplaceable leader of Betar “came to symbolize the idea of the absolute leader.”

Begin, the future founder of Likud and prime minister of Israel, was his “pupil and successor,” who shared the view of other Fascist parties that “believed in the principle of the omnipotent leader.” These were the Fascist ideas that Rahm Emanuel’s father imbibed and celebrated in his youth, and shared with his Lehi friend, Rahamim.

The distinction between the Irgun and Lehi was that the Irgun later called a truce with the British during World War II when it finally became apparent to them that Hitler represented a threat to Zionist interests, whereas Lehi saw Great Britain as much or more of the enemy than Hitler. Lehi continued terrorist attacks against Britain throughout the war.

Whatever the elder Emanuel’s political thoughts are today, he seemed to retain his youthful Fascist-style contempt for Arabs as he commented when Rahm was named President Obama’s Chief of Staff: “Obviously he’ll influence the president to be pro-Israel. Why wouldn’t he? What is he, an Arab? He’s not going to be mopping floors at the White House,” as reported in the New York Times.

None of this is to suggest that Rahm Emanuel shares any of the Fascist ideas of his father’s youthful associates in the Irgun or of his father in his youth. But if Rahm Emanuel is going to preside over secret interrogation and detention centers as the Mayor of Chicago and is responsible for a police force learning and using Fascist-style police tactics, people may begin to notice a resemblance to the youthful Benjamin Emanuel and the ideology of his Irgun associates.

Emanuel’s Style

True to form in some people’s eyes – after the court-ordered release of the video revealing the murder of Laquan McDonald – Mayor Emanuel didn’t actually take responsibility for the cover-up except to acknowledge the obvious with his statement that it “happened on my watch.” He didn’t explain how the murder was swept under the carpet for over a year so, as some allege, it wouldn’t interfere with his reelection.

NPR reported, “Emanuel acknowledged there is an underlying ‘trust problem’ that Chicago needs to address,” and “the city now needs to begin the process of healing and restoring trust and confidence in the police department.”

Furthermore, “Emanuel says supervision and leadership in the police department failed, and he promises to address ‘the thin blue line’ and ‘the code of silence,’ in which police officers ignore, deny and cover up the bad actions of a colleague.”

But with Israel making its counter-insurgency police training a major export to U.S. police forces, with American cities such as Chicago eager to adopt that training, it is little wonder that minorities increasingly feel they are under repressive military-style occupation in their communities. They have good reason to feel that way since the police are getting training from a country that is expert at keeping a conquered people under an open-ended military occupation.

Todd E. Pierce retired as a Major in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps in November 2012. His most recent assignment was defense counsel in the Office of Chief Defense Counsel, Office of Military Commissions. In the course of that assignment, he researched and reviewed the complete records of military commissions held during the Civil War and stored at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

In an obvious effort to detach himself from the growing scandal in the Windy City, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel fired the police department’s top cop today, saying it was the first step in restoring confidence in the Chicago Police Department.

To truly restore confidence, both Emanuel and Cook County State Attorney Anita Alvarez need to lose their jobs.

And it needs to be done now.

After all, it is pretty obvious they tried their best to coverup the shooting to protect their political positions as was pointed out by university professor Bernard E. Harcourt in a New York Timesopinion piece:

The Cook County prosecutor, Anita Alvarez, must have had probable cause to indict Officer Van Dyke for the Oct. 20, 2014, shooting death of Mr. McDonald the moment she viewed the police dash-cam video, after her office received it two weeks later. That video, in her own words, was “everything that it has been described to be by the news accounts. It is graphic. It is violent. It is chilling.”

Ms. Alvarez, and other city leaders, surely knew they would have to indict Mr. Van Dyke for murder as soon as the public saw that footage. “I have absolutely no doubt,” Ms. Alvarez finally said last week, “that this video will tear at the hearts of all Chicagoans.”

But the timing, in late 2014, was not good.

Then up for re-election, the mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, was looking ahead to a contested election on Feb. 24, 2015, which would ultimately result in a runoff election on April 7. In Ferguson, Mo., a grand jury was hearing testimony on the police shooting of Michael Brown. The video of Eric Garner being choked to death during an arrest in New York had gone viral. The Black Lives Matter movement was gaining momentum across the country.

The video of a police shooting like this in Chicago could have buried Mr. Emanuel’s chances for re-election. And it would likely have ended the career of the police superintendent, Garry F. McCarthy.

And so the wheels of justice virtually ground to a halt. Mayor Emanuel refused to make the dash-cam video public, going to court to prevent its release. The city argued that releasing the video would taint the investigation of the case, but even the attorney general of Illinois urged the city to make it available.

In other words it was Emanuel who had the final say in whether or not the video was released.

Firing McCarthy is the first step, who admitted today that the initial information about the shooting of McDonald was inaccurate.

Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy admitted Tuesday on NBC Chicago that the initial press release sent out after 17-year-old Laquan McDonald was fatally shot 16 times by an officer last year was wrong.

Police initially said an officer shot McDonald in the chest when the teen refused to drop a knife and continued to walk toward officers. Authorities also said the boy lunged at officers with the knife.

But dash-cam video of the shooting shows an officer shooting the teen several times as he appeared to walk away from police.

McCarthy added that he didn’t see dash-cam video of the shooting until the day after the press release went out.

So not only do we have a mayor who ordered the video not be released and a prosecutor who waited a year to file charges – and also found no wrongdoing in how police deleted surveillance video from a local Burger King – we have a police chief who claims he did not even see the video before describing what took place on the video.

And for that, he was making more than $400,000-a-year.

McCarthy is a liar, of course, as is Emanuel and Alvarez. They all saw the video and chose not to release it. Had it shown exactly what they described, they would have wasted no time in releasing the video.

Also part of the coverup is the president of the police union, who told the media that McDonald “lunged” at Chicago police officer Jason Van Dyke. The Fraternal Order of Police also paid the $1.5 million to bond Van Dyke out of jail and is also handling his attorney fees as he defends himself from the first-degree murder charge.

But we expect that from police unions which have proven to defend police officers at all costs. We even expect that from police chiefs.

The Chicago Tribune is suing Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel for not complying with public records requests after the mayor refused to release communications about city business conducted through private emails and text messages.

The lawsuit states that the mayor uses private phones and private emails to conduct city business as a way to avoid the public release of his city related correspondences and activity.

The Chicago Tribune seeks to receive emails and electronic communications pertaining to a controversial red light camera system in Chicago, a system mired in controversy and corruption.

The yellow lights were timed shorter with an intended outcome to catch more people running red lights, resulting in more traffic ticket money for the city, according to an investigative report by the Tribune last year.

More than $500 million was generated from the Chicago red light traffic system, the largest in the nation, according to the lawsuit filed last month, which can be read here.

City officials boasted the red light system would make intersections and driving safer, but an uptick in injury-related crashes occurred as a result of the red light system because of the shorter duration of yellow lights.

Because of these crashes, 50 of the cameras were removed at 25 intersections within the city.

Redflex Traffic Systems was the vendor that created the system along with former Chicago city official John Bills. It was quickly discovered that Bills and Redflex CEO David Kidwell were involved in a $2 million bribery scheme to implement the red light system in Chicago.

Kidwell and Bills were both relieved of their duties.

It is common for officials to use personal email to skirt Freedom of Information Act requests.

Recently, Phyllis Wise who is the Chancellor of The University of Illinois used personal emails to avoid Freedom of Information Act requests.

The Chancellor has since resigned from the university. Additionally, it was brought to light that Hillary Clinton used private emails to conduct official government business too.

This is the second time the Chicago Tribune has sued Mayor Emanuel; in June 2015 suit was filed regarding the non-disclosure of emails of a multi-million-dollar no-bid Chicago Public Schools contract. That suit is pending.

“We are seeking the release of public records on matters of great interest to citizens, but the city refuses to divulge them. Regrettably, the city’s denial is part of a pattern of resistance to releasing public documents covered by the Illinois Freedom of Information Act. We are compelled, therefore, to go to court for the second time in three months to force the city’s compliance.”

But Mayor Emanuel said he has done nothing wrong:

“We always comply and work through all of the Freedom of Information (requests) in the most responsive way possible. I have a practice that my political and personal stays on my private email, and city business is on the government, and that’s the way I operate.”

Written communications by government officials relating to city or government business are subject to Freedom of Information Act requests, including electronic communications.

The FBI and Chicago police department are refusing to release a video of the shooting death of a 17-year-old black man, who was killed by a police officer last year.

Chicago police and the FBI are withholding the dash-cam video because it is “central to their investigation,” Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel was quoted as saying by the Associated Press on Wednesday.

Authorities said they were “confident this video will be released at the appropriate time when their investigation is complete.”

Laquan McDonald was shot 16 times in October 2014 when he allegedly brandished a knife and refused to drop it when confronted by officers. The city has approved a $5 million settlement with the teen’s family.

Some members of the Chicago City Council fear releasing the video could spark the kind of angry protests seen elsewhere in the United States in recent months.

“Regaining the trust of the community, particularly the black community, starts with honesty and hiding a potential execution is the kind of thing that destroys trust,” said Craig Futterman, a law professor at the University of Chicago.

The shooting has not generated the same kind of national attention as other recent high-profile confrontations involving officers. The Chicago police department has long been dogged by a reputation for police brutality.

The officer who killed McDonald is not being named but he has been stripped of his police powers and put on desk duty. No decision has been made on whether he will face criminal charges in the case.

Several videos showing police brutality have been released in recent weeks. A newly released video shows a police officer in Arizona intentionally running over an armed suspect with his vehicle last month.

Police Officer Michael Rapiejko slammed his car into 36-year-old Mario Valencia which was recorded in the dashboard camera that was released on Tuesday. Valencia was taken to a hospital in serious condition but released two days later into police custody.

Another cell phone video was released last week showing an officer in North Charleston, South Carolina firing multiple times at an African-American man as he ran away, sparking outrage around the country.

CHICAGO – Chicago police are now among the nation’s leaders in the use of the controversial “stop-and-frisk” practice, replacing New York City which had been notorious for the technique. That startling finding is at the core of a new report issued today by the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois on the practice by the Chicago Police Department. The report highlights the use (and overuse) of the practice in Chicago, notes that the justification for such stops often fails to meet constitutional standards and makes recommendations for fixing CPD policies in order to curb abuses and restore community trust in the City.

Perhaps the most startling finding of the ACLU report is that during the summer of 2014, CPD conducted more than a quarter million stops of civilians that did not lead to an arrest. When comparing that number of stops to population in Chicago versus New York City at the height of that city’s controversial use of the stop-and-frisk practice, Chicagoans were stopped more than four times as often as people in New York. Stops per 1000 residents was 93.6 in Chicago, compared to 22.9 (at the highest point in 2011) in New York City. The New York police have been forced to curb significantly their use of stop-and-frisk after a federal judge found the use in that city to be unconstitutional.

“While most of the media coverage has suggested that that stop-and-frisk was a New York phenomena – it’s misuse is not limited to New York,” said Harvey Grossman, legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois. “Chicago has been systematically abusing this practice, for reasons that are not justified by our constitution.”

“And just like New York, we see that African Americans are singled out for these searches,” added Grossman.

A “stop-and-frisk” search has become common in African American and Latino communities across Chicago. Under a 1968 Supreme Court ruling, officers are allowed to stop a civilian if they have reasonable suspicion that person has been, is, or is about to be involved in criminal activity. Once the stop has occurred, officers can frisk the individual if they have reasonable suspicion that the person is dangerous or has a weapon in their possession. The ACLU report demonstrates that in Chicago, these stops disproportionately target people of color and often are done without the justification required by the Court.

According to data from calendar year 2014 analyzed by the ACLU, African Americans represent nearly 72% of all the stops in the City of Chicago, as compared to the reality that African Americans represent only about 32% of the City’s population. The data analyzed by the ACLU shows that stops most commonly take place in the districts with the largest minority populations. For example, in 2014, police conducted 266 stops per 1000 people in the Englewood area (which is predominantly African American) while the rate in predominantly white Lincoln/Foster district was just 43 per 1000 people.

However, the data also shows that African Americans are much more likely to be the target of stops in predominantly white neighborhoods. Thus, in Jefferson Park where the population is just 1% African American, African Americans account for a full 15% of all stop-and-frisks in that area. In the Near North District, where the African American population is 9.1%, African Americans are subjected to more than one-half (57.7%) of all the stops. The ACLU report concludes that “black citizens are disproportionately subjected to more stops than their white counterparts.

The report also explores the problems with the reasons for many of the stops are taking place. Each time a Chicago Police officer makes a stop, the officer is required to fill out a “contact card” collecting information about the person who was stopped and why the stop took place. The ACLU’s review of a randomly-selected number of contact cards from selected months in 2012 and 2013, found that in half of all stops reviewed the officer failed to record a legally sufficient reason for initiating the stop. In a number of other instances, police stated that they stopped someone for a reason that was unrelated to criminal activity (associating with others who were suspicious, for example) or asserting that someone “matched a description” without any explanation of how or what description was matched. In spite of this poor performance, the City reported that it has no record of police officers receiving additional training after the academy in proper procedures for stop and frisks—training that seems to be needed greatly.

“What this data shows should be a wake-up call for residents of the City,” said Karen Sheley, senior legal counsel and one of the authors of the report. “CPD is engaging in wholesale stop-and-frisks of African American youth, without any link to criminal activity in most cases.”

“These stops don’t make us safer, they simply drive a wedge further between the police and the public they serve,” added Sheley.

Equally troubling is that the City’s poor record keeping about stop and frisk has resulted in a lack of transparency and accountability. The City only records information about stops if there is no arrest or charges. Stops that result in arrest are not identifiable and so the rate of innocent persons stopped cannot be ascertained. In New York, which does keep such data, 88% of persons stopped were innocent (they were not arrested or issued a summons). Also, Chicago records no information about frisks, which prevents the City from computing the rate of frisks resulting in the seizure of contraband. For example, in New York, which records frisk data, only 2% of the frisks turned up weapons.

The ACLU of Illinois offers a four-point plan for fixing this problem without the turmoil and litigation that marked the process in New York. The ACLU’s proposal includes:

• Require police to collect data on all frisks and make the data public to be analyzed and assessed;

• Require police to collect data on all stops and make the data public to be analyzed and assessed;

• Require police officers to issue a receipt for every pedestrian stop, with the officer’s name, the time of the encounter, the place of the encounter and the reason for the encounter – making it possible to facilitate a civilian complaint regarding the encounter.

“The data makes clear that stop-and-frisk is a problem in Chicago and needs to be reformed,” said the ACLU’s Grossman. “The City has an opportunity to make modest fixes now, rather than risk further alienation with large swaths of the public.”

“Policing in Chicago ought to encourage community involvement, rather than create additional resentment.”

Book Review

By Bill Willers | Dissident Voice | July 10, 2018

There are now in the public sphere two totally contradictory narratives of the assassination in 1968 of Martin Luther King, Jr. with each being advanced again and again over the years by respective advocates as if the other did not exist.

Attorney William Pepper, confidant of Martin Luther King, Jr., became convinced in 1978 that James Earl Ray, the officially declared lone gunman, was innocent. Years of investigation led to his 1995 book, Orders to Kill, in which Pepper presented evidence of governmental involvement in the assassination. Three years later, Gerald Posner, already famous for his support for the Warren Commission’s report concerning President Kennedy’s assassination, published Killing the Dream, a defense of the official governmental contention that Ray was the assassin. The King Family also believed Ray innocent, but due to governmental refusal to pursue a criminal trial, there was instead a 1999 civil trial, The King Family vs. Loyd Jowers et al. Jowers, who had admitted having received the rifle actually used in the shooting, was granted immunity to reveal all he knew. All facets of news media boycotted the trial, arguably the de facto “Trial of the Century”. … continue

Aletho News Original Content

By Aletho News | January 9, 2012

This article will examine some of the connections between the US and UK National Security apparatus and the appearance of the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) theory beginning after the accident at Three Mile Island. … continue

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The word "alleged" is deemed to occur before the word "fraud." Since the rule of law still applies. To peasants, at least.

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